


Safe as (Haunted) Houses

by Estelle (Fielding)



Category: Brooklyn Nine-Nine (TV)
Genre: B99 Fall 2019 Fic Exchange, Gen, Haunted House, Pre-Canon, but canon-compliant
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-10-31
Updated: 2019-10-31
Packaged: 2021-01-15 07:07:44
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,424
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21249410
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Fielding/pseuds/Estelle
Summary: Amy and Jake chase a teenage car thief into a haunted house. And things get weird.





	Safe as (Haunted) Houses

**Author's Note:**

  * For [loudamy](https://archiveofourown.org/users/loudamy/gifts).

> This story was written for the Tumblr Fall 2019 Fic Exchange. Vickovac's prompts were so fantastic that I had to write two! The prompt for this one is at the end of the story.
> 
> Thank you to the best beta, Drowninginmyworries. And thank you to the organizers of the fall fic exchange!

Amy approached their perp with her hands held out at her sides, gun holstered, and said, “It’s okay, we can work this out,” instead of taking him down hard and sitting on him until Jake arrived.

He was just a teenager in a creepy bunny costume. She had him cornered in an empty warehouse. He was probably way more scared than dangerous, she figured.

And then the kid hopped straight through a second-floor window.

“We’ve got a rabbit,” she called into her radio as she raced toward the window to see where he’d gone.

“I’ve got eyes on him,” Jake responded. “Wow, you literally meant a rabbit.”

Amy spotted the kid drop off the fire escape ladder directly below and take off across the parking lot. Seconds later Jake was sprinting after him. Amy climbed through the broken window, glass crunching under her boots on the other side, and trotted down the stairs to join the chase.

The kid was fast and he clearly knew the neighborhood they were racing through, ducking down alleys and slipping between junked cars and over rotting wood fences like he’d been training for a quick escape. The bunny costume – a full-body getup that covered everything but his hands and feet and face – didn’t seem to be slowing him down at all.

Amy caught up to Jake easily enough and they ran side by side after that, one of them occasionally pulling off to try to cut off the kid at a shortcut. Jake tried calling after him to slow down and give the old people a fighting chance but the kid wasn’t even humoring them with a taunt or a middle finger. He just stayed steady and fast.

Amy was beginning to think they weren’t going to outrun him – she could hear Jake huffing just behind her right shoulder, and she had a horrible stitch in her side – when the kid swung into another parking lot, beneath a banner that read “Bedford Academy Spook Night,” and ran straight toward a noisy crowd of people and lights. They were going to lose him fast among all of those people, and Amy grunted and managed to speed up, just a little. She felt Jake do the same, feet slapping the ground a half-pace behind her.

As they got closer Amy saw that the crowd was mostly teenagers, a lot of them in costumes too, which made things worse. She kept her eyes on the bunny, glad for the raggedy ears sticking out on top as she dodged past zombies and ghosts and sexy pirates, and called out to Jake when the kid made a sharp right turn. She was actually picking him off, close enough that she could hear his rough panting, when he jerked suddenly to the left and pushed through a crowd of kids lined up in a row, and disappeared through a dark doorway. Amy sprinted after him, just at his heels, and ran straight into the darkness.

She jerked to a stop when she suddenly couldn’t see a thing. Jake slammed into her back, causing them both to stumble forward a few steps in the pitch black. Amy swore softly and threw up her hands to keep from stumbling into anything. She felt Jake grabbing at her shoulders to steady both of them.

“Sorry, sorry,” he muttered.

Amy bit her tongue to keep from snapping at him. She blinked in the darkness, which was starting to resolve itself into faint shadows. She could hear odd noises coming from all around, but mostly ahead – groans and moans, what sounded like chains rattling, and suddenly, a piercing shriek. She reached for her gun automatically and thought she heard Jake do the same.

“I think-” Jake said, but then someone was pushing past them, and a young voice said, “Hey, c’mon, you guys cut the line.”

A light came on and Amy shielded her eyes from the sudden brightness. Squinting ahead, she found herself staring into the white-painted face of a teenage girl, who held a flashlight under her chin, so its light made her skin look translucent in places. She had fake blood dripping out of her nose and eyes and ears and mouth, and she was dressed in a black dress that had been shredded in places. She shifted her flashlight toward Amy and Jake, who both groaned and looked away from it.

“You two have tickets?” she said.

“Tickets?” Amy repeated.

The girl held out a hand, palm up. “It’s five tickets. Or $10.”

Amy reached for the badge clipped to her belt and held that up. “How’s this?”

The girl narrowed her eyes and studied the badge. “Kind of a lame costume, honestly.”

“It’s not a costume,” Amy said through her teeth. “We’re cops. We followed someone in here and we need to find him. No one else can come in until we say it’s okay, got it?”

The girl rolled her eyes very dramatically. “Seriously? You know this is like the only thing that makes money at this dumb carnival. Don’t you even care about our charity?”

“What charity?” Amy said.

“I don’t know, it’s _ charity _,” the girl said.

“Just keep it closed until I say so,” Amy said. She turned to Jake. “C’mon.”

“Uh-”

“What?” Amy said, impatient. By now, the kid could already be long gone but Amy wasn’t going to give up just yet. “Let’s go. We need to grab him before he finds a way out.”

“Can’t we just- let him go?” Jake said.

Amy stared at him for a long moment because that was too absurd for words. “He stole three cars, Jake.”

“Yeah, but what’s three cars? Maybe he took them for environmental reasons. He could be a climate change vigilante for all we know.”

“I don’t know what your deal is but please stop talking,” Amy said, and turned to go again.

But Jake said, “Maybe one of us should wait outside. You know, in case the kid finds another way out.”

Amy huffed in aggravation. This hesitation was so unlike Jake, who if anything should be elbowing her out of the way to run down the perp by now, all caution tossed aside. If she didn’t know him better – and after two years working with him, she knew him much better than she would have liked, frankly – she’d think he sounded uncertain, maybe even scared. But that was ridiculous. And anyway, Jake did have a point, they needed eyes on the outside to make sure the kid didn’t get away.

She turned to the mean girl watching the door. “Is there a security guard around?”

“Yeah, over there,” the girl said. She was inspecting her nails under the flashlight beam and did not give any hint to where “over there” was. Amy pursed her lips to keep from swearing and ducked back outside, where a very long line had formed and kids were peering around each other and muttering irritably. At the head of the line was a man with a patch on his jacket that read “security.”

“Hey, you,” Amy said. When the guard looked up, she said, “My partner and I are looking for a kid who just ran in here. He’s a white male, 16 years old, dressed in a dirty rabbit costume.”

“Donnie Darko bunny,” Jake said.

The guard nodded eagerly at that, so Amy assumed the reference meant something to him. “Where’s the exit to this thing?” she said.

“Next door up,” the guard said, pointing.

“Are there any other ways in or out of this room?” Amy said. The guard shook his head. “Okay, then we need you to guard the entrance and exit and make sure the bunny doesn’t get out ahead of us. And don’t let any other kids inside either. Got it?”

“Sure,” the guard said.

Amy was not even a little confident in this guard’s ability to stop their perp, but he was all they had, and it felt like they’d been figuring out logistics for an hour already. She needed this collar. She was going to get this collar.

She pushed Jake back toward the dark doorway.

“Amy,” Jake said in a whisper, as they paused just inside the door to let their eyes adjust.

“What.”

“I think this is a bad idea,” he said.

“Jake, I know he’s just a kid but stealing cars is big-time and I really don’t get your issue here. You happily arrested that 15-year-old two weeks ago for stealing some dumb shoes.”

“Those were Adidas Run DMC 25th Anniversary reissues,” Jake said, indignant. “But that’s not what I meant. Do you know what this place is?”

Amy frowned. She was blinking her eyes rapidly to try to see better. “Um, a classroom, I guess? Maybe a cafeteria?”

“It’s a haunted house,” Jake hissed.

“I know that,” Amy said testily as she inched forward, looking all around. She could hear more moaning up ahead. “What’s your point?”

When Jake didn’t answer right away, she took a quick look over her shoulder at him. It was hard to tell in the dark, but he looked pale, his eyes deep black shadows against his colorless cheeks and forehead.

“Jake?”

“Never mind,” he said, and ducked his head. “Let’s go.”

Amy frowned at him for a moment, then shrugged to herself and turned back around.

“Remember, we’ve got civilians in here. Keep your gun holstered,” she said to him in a whisper, and checked her own weapon to make sure it was secure.

“Only you would call high school kids ‘civilians,’ weirdo,” Jake muttered.

Amy ignored him and headed down the narrow hallway that led into the haunted house. She considered turning on her flashlight, but she didn’t want to give away their position, so she stumbled forward slowly.

She thought the place was probably one larger room subdivided by temporary walls painted black; Amy rapped her knuckles against the right side of the hall and found that it was actually made of canvas or some other fabric pulled taut. Black lights were strung overhead, illuminating streaks and splashes of something wet and glistening on the walls and floor, and fine tufts of cobwebs hung precariously from the ceiling, low enough that Amy found herself ducking more than once.

She expected spooky music or pre-recorded sound effects to make the mood, but even the moaning had stopped and now it was eerily silent. Their footsteps were muted on the floor, which must have been painted over too because it was so black she could barely make out the path ahead of them. The darkness all around was oppressively thick, like a physical presence.

Something small and hard-shelled knocked into her forehead and Amy startled badly and batted at it, before realizing it was a fake spider swinging from the end of a string. A moment later she felt something hit the top of her head and she swatted that away too, feeling a little frenzied when it got tangled in her hair. She finally pulled it loose and tossed it aside; it felt like a cockroach and she dearly hoped it was fake too.

She ran her hands through her hair, making sure nothing else was stuck, then glanced up when she thought she saw a flash of motion out of the corner of her eye, up ahead at the end of the hallway. She set her hand on the butt of her gun, and though she had no intention of pulling it out, the weight of it on her hip was reassuring. She crept along, conscious of Jake on her heels, and in the shadows at the end of the hall she could see the barest of movement, like a breeze ruffling through curtains. It could be a kid ready to jump out of the dark and scream boo, or it could be their rabbit. Amy grit her teeth and pressed on.

They were almost at the end of the hall, Jake so close she could feel the warmth of his body at her back, when she heard a rustle, a rush of air, and she was face to face with someone – two people. In a breath she’d pulled her gun and was opening her mouth to call out.

Then she blinked and realized she was staring at herself.

Jake screamed.

“It’s fine! It’s a mirror!” Amy said to him, trying to keep her voice low. Her pulse was racing and she could feel the sting of adrenaline in her arms and legs. At least her fight-or-flight system was fully functional, she thought wryly.

She could hear Jake breathing hard and when she turned to him, he was bent over his knees and had a hand planted against his chest, like someone afraid they were having a heart attack. She was relieved to see he hadn’t pulled his weapon, at least. Amy quickly holstered her own.

“It was just us,” she said to Jake.

She wondered if she should rub his shoulder or something, but they didn’t really do the physical comfort thing, and if Jake was anything like pretty much every other guy she knew, he wouldn’t want her acknowledging that he was scared out of his mind. That said: He was obviously scared out of his mind. This was a side of him she’d never seen before, and abruptly Amy thought, Huh, Jake Peralta could still surprise her.

She hesitantly patted his upper arm in a way that she hoped could be read as either comfort or just trying to get his attention. Jake looked at her, and up close she could see that he had gone even paler, his lips gray and his cheeks and forehead a pasty white.

“You okay?” she said.

“Yeah.” He swallowed hard, and nodded. “Yes. Let’s go.”

Amy gave him a last long look, then nodded back and led the way. The right turn ended up being a U-turn, and ahead of the was another long, dark hallway. To their left Amy could hear moans and grunts again, coming from another part of the room, maybe a hall or two over. She heard a girl shriek, followed immediately by laughter. Amy hoped there weren’t many kids in the haunted house ahead of them, complicating their hunt for the bunny. She wondered if they should have turned on all the lights before going in, but it was too late for that now and she wasn’t going to distract herself with second guessing.

She moved them along this hallway faster than the first, partly because her eyes were adjusted to the dark, and partly because now that the first scare was behind them she was feeling a bit more confident. With seven brothers, Amy had been through more haunted houses than she could ever count, growing up, and she’d learned that one trick to mastering them was showing no fear. The actors went after the easy prey – the screamers, the criers, the people who groped and stuttered through, so obviously terrified they could be part of the illusion. And girls – girls were always targets, especially young girls with glasses and ponytails with brothers who liked to set them up. Amy could never give her brothers the satisfaction of refusing to go to a haunted house, so instead she’d just simply refused to be scared. Or at least to show it.

Now, she casually brushed aside more fake cobwebs and dangling spiders as they walked, keeping her eyes on the end of the hall and the next turn. Every now and then a breeze would brush past them, carrying on it a wave of cold and the faintly disturbing odor, like burned hair or something sweet-rotten. Every now and then she felt Jake’s hand brush against her back, like maybe he was still having trouble seeing in the dark. She was tempted to shake him off, to snap at him to give her some space, even slowing down to turn toward him-

A hand jerked out in front of her, right through the wall. Its fingers were swollen and rotting, flesh dangling in bloody strips from the knuckles, and the forearm was bloated and mottled in blue and purple. The hand rolled and its fingers blindly clawed and clutched at Amy.

Amy gasped and jumped back a half-step. Behind her Jake squeaked.

“What the fuck is that!” he called out, breathless.

The hand lurched for them and Jake grabbed Amy’s hand, yanking her back with him as he retreated.

“Jake! It’s just make-up. It’s fake.” Her own heart was throbbing and she willed herself to slow down, to breathe deep. When she turned to Jake his eyes were wide and black and she could make out the sweat on his brow. “Jake, c’mon. It’s a haunted house. It’s not real.”

Jake took a deep breath and shook his head, “I know, I know. Sorry.” He ran a hand through his hair and Amy noted that it was shaking. “Sorry, I just, I really, really hate these things.”

“No kidding,” Amy said, which earned her a small smirk from him, at least. “You ready?”

After another deep breath, he nodded. “Yeah.”

That was when they both noticed he was still holding her hand. They looked down together at their clasped hands – his right, her left – and Amy felt Jake jerk his away. And she wasn’t sure why, but she held on tight. Then, after another moment, she dropped his hand and said, “Hold on,” and moved to his other side and took his left hand in her right.

“I’m left-handed,” she said to him, as though this was a totally normal thing.

“Amy-”

“C’mon,” she said. “Let’s get our rabbit.”

She tugged on his hand, and he stuttered a step or two and then followed along. Amy brushed past the mangled arm just as it was withdrawn back into the wall, and when she reached the end of the hall she ducked carefully around the corner, looking for their rabbit and for any other haunted house surprises. But she saw only the same empty darkness. After a quick check over her shoulder at Jake, who gave her a tight, close-lipped smile and a nod, she turned the corner.

Amy inched ahead, now conscious of Jake’s hand in hers. His palm was cool and a little clammy, but not unpleasantly so. She couldn’t help noticing that they had matching calluses – on the base of the thumb, the pads of the index and middle fingers. His hand was large, his fingers wrapped almost entirely around her palm in a way that was strangely comforting, though Amy was aware she was the one providing the comfort. She squeezed his hand without thinking about it, and when he squeezed back after a moment she felt a rush of something like relief.

This corridor was somewhat narrower than the others, and darker. The walls weren’t splattered with glowing blood or other strange marks, but there were framed portraits at irregular intervals, the faces pale and grim, and painted as though by someone who didn’t quite know what faces looked like, who didn’t understand them. There was something off about all of them, the noses misplaced, the eyes somewhat too far apart, the proportions all wrong. Amy felt like the eyes were following them, but of course they would have been painted to make it seem that way.

They were halfway down the hall when one of the faces screamed.

“Get out, cop! Get out of my house!”

Amy jerked away from the portrait, only for another voice to cry out behind her. “Kill her! Kill him! Stab them in the eyes!”

“What the-” Jake said, voice catching and breaking. Amy gripped his hand and wrenched him forward, and they picked up speed and dashed to the end of the hall and rounded the next corner, Amy barely sparing a moment to pause and scan ahead. The portraits kept yelling at them, and more joined in until it was a chorus of insults and promised torture.

“Want to pull all the teeth out of that cop’s big mouth!”

“Gonna break all the bones in the lady cop’s hands!”

They ran past a door against which something appeared to be pounding relentlessly, the frame bending and creaking, and past a curtain from which a bony hand curled around, ready to pull the fabric aside. Amy didn’t pause to see what would be revealed. At the end of the corridor finally the portraits stopped screaming and the house went dead silent, even the rattling of the door gone quiet. Amy paused to catch her breath and maybe give Jake a pep talk (maybe give them both a pep talk, honestly). Then a white-faced clown popped seemingly right out of the wall beside them and screamed “boo!” in their faces.

Jake shrieked and Amy yelled, “NYPD!”

The clown grinned maniacally at them, its pointy teeth dripping with fake blood, and Amy shoved her badge in its face and said, “Seriously, get lost.” The clown frowned at them and flipped them off, but disappeared back behind a dark curtain Amy hadn’t noticed before.

“Mother fu-”

“He’s gone,” Amy said, cutting him off.

“That was a clown, Amy. A clown with sharp teeth and red eyes.”

“I know, I saw him.”

“Clown!”

He was trembling all over, and holding her hand so tightly her fingers were aching. She realized they needed to get out before he had some sort of breakdown, or accidentally shot one of the kids. She was getting pretty fed up with this place herself.

“We’ve got to be close to the end,” Amy said. “Let’s just keep going.”

“A clown,” Jake said, quiet like he was talking to himself, and he let her lead him on.

They turned right and faced another dark hallway. But at the end of this tunnel was a rectangle of light.

“Jake,” she said, squeezing his hand. “That’s the exit.”

“Thank god.” He released the words on a sigh.

Amy felt a flash of disappointment that they hadn’t caught their rabbit. She realized she’d been so focused on the haunted house, and on getting Jake through it, that she hadn’t been as thorough, as careful as she should have been – checking behind all those dark curtains, behind the portraits and the battered doors, the myriad places their kid could have hidden if he knew his way around the haunted house. But he was just a kid, after all, and he’d only stolen a few cars. McGinley certainly wouldn’t care that they’d lost him.

She moved forward, and Jake’s grip on her hand loosened a bit, but she didn’t let go. Instead, she twined their fingers, locking them together. She felt Jake’s gaze on the side of her face but she didn’t look back at him. She was going to see him through the end of this dumb haunted house, and she wasn’t going to make him feel bad about it.

They moved quickly – past another door that rattled and a blood-red curtain behind which something moaned as if in terrible pain. They stepped over a wet puddle that gleamed a sickly green. A skeleton dropped down in front of them, and they were staring into the fierce, grinning muzzle of a dead dog. She assumed it was a fake, but the brittle bones, stained brown and black, looked real in the dim lighting. She pushed it aside with an elbow.

They were halfway down the hall, close enough to the light that she could make out people milling around outside and hear faint rings of laughter and happy chatter, when Jake stopped so suddenly that Amy’s arm jerked back, wrenching her shoulder. She swore under her breath and turned to glare at him.

“Jake-”

But he raised a finger to his lips, and nodded his head to his right. Amy frowned and looked to her left, and at first she saw nothing, but then a flutter of movement caught her eye and she realized she was looking at another curtain, this one so black that it blended almost seamlessly with the black walls of the hallway. She still didn’t understand what had drawn Jake’s attention, though, until she glanced back at him and he pointed up. And there, poking between the edge of the curtain and the wall, was the tip of a dirty white bunny ear.

Amy looked back at Jake and raised her eyebrows, and he made a few complicated hand gestures, and Amy rolled her eyes but she understood – he wanted her to block the exit, and he would approach the curtain. Amy shook her head and gestured back at him that he should take the exit, and he scowled at her and repeated his hand motions, and she gave him her most menacing frown and planted a hand on her hip, and they glared at each other until he gave up and moved toward the door.

He let go of her hand, and Amy felt something clench in her chest. It was weird. She shook it off.

Amy laid a hand on the butt of her gun but left it in the holster. She glanced once at Jake to make sure he was ready, and he gave her a short nod. She took a step toward the curtain, and reached toward the edge of it with one hand. She jerked back the curtain, and there stood their rabbit.

“NYPD!” Amy yelled.

“Don’t move!” Jake said, suddenly at her side.

The rabbit was standing in a shallow dark alcove, his back to the wall, and he raised his hands. He looked so young when he lifted his face to them. Amy felt a pang of sympathy.

And then he started laughing and he pointed at Jake and said, “You scream like a girl, man.”

Amy grabbed the kid by an ear and hoisted him out of the alcove and said, “You’re a 16-year-old boy in a bunny costume, shut up,” and she let Jake do the handcuffing while she read him his rights.

+++

The cheers and boos were pretty evenly distributed when they walked out of the haunted house with the handcuffed rabbit in front of them. Amy figured the applause mostly came from people who were glad the haunted house was back in business now that the cops were done.

The security guard turned out to be a decent guy, and he’d called backup while they were inside. So Amy happily passed the kid off to the patrol officers. But it was only one squad car, and when the officers offered to give them a ride back to their own car in the backseat, Amy passed without checking with Jake.

She sort of regretted that though as they began the walk back, the silence between them heavy and stilted. She had questions, of course, and he clearly was feeling bad, even ashamed.

Though they partnered often enough these days, theirs wasn’t what Amy would call a friendly relationship. They tolerated each other. Usually. Which was still a vast improvement over the mutual dislike-borderline-hate that had characterized their earliest interactions. Jake was still immature and unprofessional and a self-described lone wolf who had a hard time trusting, or letting himself be trusted. And Amy knew she was still stubborn and high strung and even, occasionally, overbearing. But they’d found ways to slot together anyway, and when they weren’t driving each other crazy they were a good team.

But this was new territory, and Amy wasn’t sure if she was supposed to ask what had happened in the haunted house or ignore it or tease him or something else entirely. She’d never seen Jake that scared before. Not when they’d chased a serial strangler through a warehouse filled entirely with vacant-eyed doll heads, not when he’d somehow gotten his hand stuck in the locker they all referred to as the cockroach nest, not even when a perp had surprised him and slammed him face-first into a wall and shoved a gun into the base of his skull – Jake, blood gushing from his nose over his mouth and chin, had just yelled at Rosa to shoot the guy in the penis.

Jake was an eyes-closed, head-first into danger kind of cop, and he almost always cast Amy in the role of safety monitor, which she hated because she wasn’t exactly cautious herself when it came to fieldwork. Careful, thoughtful and practical, yes. But never overly so. Around Jake, though, she was the sane one, the one calling for backup or making sure all of the closets and bathrooms were clear before holstering her weapon.

He’d been terrified in the haunted house, though. The kind of white-knuckled fear that had some cops requesting desk assignments – the kind of fear that might make a partner wonder whether he was going to have her back. Amy realized she couldn’t just let this go.

“What happened back there?”

They were taking the less direct route back to their car, now that they weren’t chasing a kid through alleys and backyards. Amy thought it was about a ten-block walk. She heard Jake sigh beside her and from the corner of her eye saw him stuff his hands in his jacket pockets.

Finally he shrugged. “Haunted houses are scary. I was scared.”

“A lot of things are scary,” Amy said. “Like serial killers with guns and meth-heads with very big knives and doll-head warehouses. I’ve never seen you scared around any of those before.”

He kicked at an empty soda can and the clang of it bouncing off the curb and into the street was loud in the empty night. It was cold out, and Amy shivered and buried her hands in her coat pockets too. She wondered if Jake wasn’t going to reply. She hadn’t actually asked him a question.

“I’ve been scared those times too,” he said after a few minutes. “But there’s no time to really _ be _ scared.”

“Jake, that makes no sense,” Amy said, trying to keep the exasperation out of her voice.

She watched his brow furrow, saw the pinch of his lips as he thought about what to say next.

“Haunted houses, their whole purpose is to scare you. As soon as I walked through that door tonight, I knew horrible things were going to jump out and scream in my face and try to freak me out. It’s just a given, you know? But real-life situations, you don’t know. And that not knowing, it freaks some people out, but for me it’s just – you prepare for the worst to happen and you do your best, and my best is pretty awesome.”

He shrugged and added, “A creepy warehouse with doll heads might just be a creepy warehouse with doll heads by the time we’re done, or we might get to arrest someone. A haunted house, the deck is stacked – you’re going to lose the second you step foot inside.”

Amy nodded to herself as he spoke, because it made an absurd kind of sense. Jake didn’t like feeling scared, or vulnerable, and a haunted house was basically guaranteed to make him feel that way. She supposed that she could wrap her head around that. They walked in silence for another block, both huddled against the brisk fall wind that was picking up, scattering dry leaves at their feet and making skeleton-limbed trees bend and sway. It was a moonless night, and in this neighborhood, there weren’t many streetlamps or warm window glows to light their way.

“Okay, but seriously,” she said, as they rounded the last corner to their car. “What’s the real reason you don’t like haunted houses?”

Jake groaned and ran a hand through his hair, and he said, “Fine, I went to a haunted house once with a group of friends and I got super scared and they all made fun of me.”

“And?”

He sighed. “And I wet my pants.”

“And?”

“And I was 28.”

“There it is,” Amy said.

Jake cringed and he sighed in a very put-upon way, and when she glanced at him she read all over his face that he was prepared to never live this down with her, or the rest of the squad once she told them. Amy had no intention of holding this over his head, though, or of telling anyone else. If she was learning one thing from Jake, it was that partners looked out for each other in all kinds of unexpected ways.

But he didn’t need to know that. Not right away.

THE END

**Author's Note:**

> VIckovac's prompt: Jake and Amy have to go into a haunted house for a case (chasing a perp or something) and it's actually pretty scary so they end up holding hands (pre-relationship).


End file.
